Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso ( 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor,printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. 

Picasso showed early signs of being an artist, being able to paint realistic images in ihis early childhood and adolescent years.

Photo Montage-Gustav Klutis.

Max Ernst was a German-born Surrealist who helped shape the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in America post-World War II. Armed with an academic understanding of Freud, Ernst often turned to his work-whether sculpture, painting, or collage-as a means of processing his experience in World War I and unpacking his feelings of dispossession in its wake. 

Photo Montage-Oscar Rejlander.

This allegorical tableau vivant, or mise-en-scène was created by Oscar Rejlander in 1857. It depicts a philosopher, or a sage, or perhaps a father leading two young men towards manhood. One (to the left) looks towards vice; gambling, wine and prostitution, and the other, with perhaps less enthusiasm,¹ looks towards virtue; religion, industry and family. Penitence, in the center, looks toward the right, rejecting vice. The image was the first publicly exhibited photograph of a nude, the first major art photograph and the first photo-montage.

Photo Montage-Alexander Rodchenko.

Alexander Rodchenko is perhaps the most important avant-garde artist to have put his art in the service of political revolution. In this regard, his career is a model of the clash between modern art and radical politics. He emerged as a fairly conventional painter, but his encounters with Russian Futurists propelled him to become an influential founder of the Constructivist movement. And his commitment to the Russian Revolution subsequently encouraged him to abandon first painting and then fine art in its entirety, and to instead put his skills in the service of industry and the state, designing everything from advertisements to book covers. His life's work was a ceaseless experiment with an extraordinary array of media, from painting and sculpture to graphic design and photography. Later in his career, however, the increasingly repressive policies targeted against modern artists in Russia led him to return to painting.

Photo Montage-John Heartfield.

Of the Berlin group, John Heartfield remains the best known and revered as a result of his single-minded devotion to anti-Nazi political activism. However, his early montages were collaborative efforts that resemble the work of all the other Dadaists. He and George Grosz experimented with cut-up pieces of newspaper and photos of their fellow artists, and produced many of the early designs for Dada posters and manifestos.

He had never been afraid to express his views, even to the point of anglicising his German name in response to the horrors of the First World War. Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde founded a publishing house Malik-Verlag, which provided an outlet for his highly provocative propaganda. Much of Heartfield's best work was for the front cover of the newspaper AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung) which continued to publish in Germany until 1933, when artist and newspaper moved to Prague to escape Nazi persecution.

Photo Montage-David Hockney.

Born in Bradford, England, in 1937, David Hockney attended art school in London before moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s. There, he painted his famous swimming pool paintings. In the 1970s, Hockney began working in photography, creating photo collages he called joiners. He continues to create and exhibit art, and in 2011 he was voted the most influential British artist of the 20th century.

Hockney attended the Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1957. Then, because he was a conscientious objector to military service, he spent two years working in hospitals to fulfill his national service requirement. In 1959, he entered graduate school at the Royal College of Art in London alongside other young artists such as Peter Blake and Allen Jones, and he experimented with different forms, including abstract expressionism. He did well as a student, and his paintings won prizes and were purchased for private collections.

Hockney’s early paintings incorporated his literary leanings, and he used fragments of poems and quotations from Walt Whitman in his work. This practice, and paintings such as We Two Boys Clinging Together, which he created in 1961, were the first nods to his homosexuality in his art. 

Photo Montage-Richard Hamilton.

Richard Hamilton, the most influential British artist of the 20th century, has died aged 89.

In his long, productive life he created the most important and enduring works of any British modern painter.

This may sound a surprising claim. We have our national icons and our pop celebrities. But neither Francis Bacon nor Lucian Freud nor Damien Hirst has shaped modern art as Hamilton did when he put a lolly with the word POP on it in the hand of a muscleman in his 1956 collage, Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Hamilton has a serious claim to be the inventor of pop art: this collage is a visionary, yet ironic, manifesto for a new art that would be at home in the modern world. For him, in a postwar Britain of austerity measures, pop was a utopian ideal. Big, fast cars were the metal angels of a smooth, beautiful future.